Jazz.

Diva In Development

After Years Performing At Bar Mitzvahs, Stephanie Browning Commands Attention

February 23, 1997|By Howard Reich, Tribune Arts Critic.

By now, it would not be an exaggeration to consider the Gold Star Sardine Bar as Chicago's pre-eminent showcase for emerging jazz divas.

No less than Patricia Barber and Spider Saloff, after all, first stepped into the local spotlight in this posh little room, with both now enjoying national reputations.

For listeners who value superb jazz singing--an increasingly rare commodity among young artists--the good news is that the Sardine Bar has struck gold again, this time in a gifted and promising vocalist named Stephanie Browning.

Unknown to most Chicagoans until last year, when her stint at the Gold Star began to generate word-of-mouth buzz, Browning has been packing the tiny club with that most elusive kind of audience--nocturnal revelers who genuinely listen. Step into the Gold Star any Monday through Wednesday or Friday, the nights Browning performs, and you'll behold the audience hanging on her every whispered syllable.

"After spending so many years performing at weddings and bar mitzvahs and supper clubs, the thing that struck me about the Gold Star was that I could hear myself inhale before I even sang a note," says Browning, who will be cutting her first record live at the Gold Star on March 6 and 7.

"To suddenly be aware of every sound you're making, and to have the audience equally aware, was an enormous eye-opener to me. It was like, `Wow--so this is what I sound like.' "

That's the reaction that many listeners are having, for, at her best, Browning sounds as distinct as she is accomplished. The flexibility and suppleness of her instrument, the accuracy of her pitch, the perpetual shading of her tone and the vigor of her approach to swing are bound to leave a vivid impression. That Browning also revels in unconventional interpretations and unusual tempos makes the proceedings all the more interesting.

What Browning's fans don't know, however, is that she has been working on the Chicago music scene for more than five years--though she was determined to play low-visibility rooms well outside media scrutiny. Having moved to Chicago from Denver in 1991, she didn't feel quite ready to compete in a town where vocalists as accomplished as Barber, Saloff, Geraldine de Haas, Kurt Elling and Everett Greene routinely set sparks flying.

"I came to Chicago because a friend of mine from high school, a painter named Mary Livoni, called me and said, `There's so much music in this city, you just have to come here,' " remembers Browning, who was born in Boulder, Colo. and moved to Denver after graduating high school. Though she always had sung privately, she didn't begin seriously pursuing the jazz life until the late 1980s, when she had become disenchanted with work in modeling and advertising.

Furthermore, "I always had felt like an alien in Colorado, where people were eating granola and riding bikes all the time. When I got to Chicago, I found there are so many more people here like me, who preferred smoking cigarettes and listening to jazz."

So Browning began playing various neighborhood restaurants and working the inevitable wedding circuit, along the way trying to nurture a vocal technique and an approach to jazz singing that would be her own.

"When Stephanie first came to me, a couple of years ago, she had developed certain singing habits that had limited her range," remembers Beverly Coleman, a voice teacher based on the North Shore.

"For one, because she had worked as a model, certain postural things had happened that affected her singing. Models have to throw their weight and their hips forward, but by throwing your hips forward, your neck juts forward, which impinges on your vocal cords.

"That posture prevents you from using the proper muscles for inhaling and exhaling that you need to use for good singing, so Stephanie had to learn different ways of breathing.

"But she was determined."

She must have been, for by the time Browning had settled in at the Gold Star, she was singing with a seeming naturalness and ease one does not often encounter in up-and-coming vocalists.

In fact, says Browning, "People often say to me, `Why would you take voice lessons? You sound so natural.'

"And I always say, `Thank you for thinking that something I have slavishly learned to do seems natural.' "

But Browning also appears to have benefited musically from her marriage to Larry Kohut, an exceptional Chicago bassist whom she met on a gig in 1993 and married in '94. The influence of Kohut, who has accompanied Elling and other top Chicago artists, is palpable in Browning's work. Perhaps that's not surprising, since Kohut plays the Gold Star date every Friday night.

"Larry was listening to me on a level that I wasn't even listening to," says Browning.

"While we would be driving home after a set, he would tell me, `You're not making the (chord) changes,' or `You keep going for that flatted seventh,' or `You're doing a blues thing on that tune, but it just isn't a blues tune.'